The Coming Interspiritual--Archive Edition

lived spiritual experience. The difference between this spiritually-oriented ecology and a religious approach to ecology can be seen as analogous to how the Interspiritual Movement moves beyond interfaith and interreligious dialogue to focus on the actual experience of spiritual principles and practices. Spiritual Ecology similarly explores the importance of this experiential spiritual dimension in relation to our present ecological crisis.

The focus of this emerging movement is to bring our attention to the world as a living spiritual being which is now in distress. The earth is calling to us, sending us signs of the extremity of its imbalance through earthquakes and tsunamis, floods and storms, drought, and unprecedented heat. These are what Thich Nhat Hanh calls the “Bells of Mindfulness” awakening our awareness to where it is needed at this moment in time. We cannot afford to do our spiritual practice in isolation, in separation. It is not just about us, our own interior practice, but about the greater whole of which we are a part. We are needed to respond to the cry of the earth.

And although we should be aware of the predictions of scientists, the world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness there can be no healing. And this comes from far deeper than Newtonian science and the Age of Enlightenment, but lies in our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, which is also our own sacred nature. When our Western monotheistic culture suppressed the many gods and goddess of creation, cut down the sacred groves and banished God to heaven, we began a cycle that has left us with a world destitute of the sacred, in a way unthinkable to any indigenous people. The natural world and the people who carry its wisdom know that the created world and all of its many inhabitants are sacred and belong together. Our separation from the natural world may have given us the fruits of technology and science, but it has left us bereft of any instinctual connection to the spiritual dimension of life—the connection between our soul and the soul of the world, the knowing that we are all part of one living, spiritual being.

It is this wholeness that is calling to us now, that needs our response. It needs us to reclaim our own root and rootedness: our relationship to the sacred within creation.

Only from the place of sacred wholeness and reverence can we begin the work of healing, of bringing the world back into balance.

We cannot return to the simplicity of an